District 11 doing well as it enters new school year

In addition, District 11 announces a few changes to its power ratings and team wrestling format.

September 17, 2013|By Keith Groller, Of The Morning Call

District 11, under the direction of new chairman Bob Hartman, held a teleconference with area media on Tuesday to open the lines of communication on all things going on with local high school sports' primary governing body.

In addition to going over a variety of changes, mostly minor tweaks, to some of its sports tournaments, District 11's No. 1 message was that things are going well financially.

"We had a pretty good year last year," said District 11 treasurer Tom Moll, who is also the Catasauqua High athletic director. "We kind of follow the college format where football and basketball carry the rest of the sports. In the other sports, we try to minimize any losses and break even. That's why what happened with baseball was such a great thing."

What happened with baseball is that through a sponsorship with the Lehigh Valley Baseball Academy helping to defray the costs involved with renting Coca-Cola Park for the championship games, District 11 turned a profit of $3,703.

"Two years ago, baseball lost $10,207 and three years ago we lost $8,429, so to go from a $10,000 loss to a $3,700 profit was a pretty substantial turnaround and that's a credit to the sponsorship," Moll said.

And when District 11 does well it means its member schools do well.

District 11 takes care of the PIAA dues for all of its schools, a total that comes to $37,000. In addition, a large percentage of the dollars made during the football and basketball tournaments are given back to the schools that are involved.

"There are a lot of districts who have entry fees for their tournaments and we don't have that," Moll said. "We're happy we can pay the dues for the schools and we do give money back and we don't have entry fees."

In terms of things that have been changed, District 11 has made some tweaks to its complicated power ratings formula, which is used to determine who makes the postseason and at what seed for most sports.

This year the system will reward wins slightly more than last year in determining the power rating. This year, wins will count for 59 percent of the process, and strength of schedule 41 percent. Last year, the split was 55 to 45.

Also, teams who do not make up postponed games that were scheduled — unless they can prove it was nearly impossible to do so — will be penalized. For not playing a game during the 20-game baseball or softball schedule, for example, a team would essentially be penalized five percent.

In addition, teams who play non-PIAA opponents will now just have the win or loss count toward qualifying for a District 11 tournament, but the power rating component to that game will not apply.

There was also a change announced with the team wrestling tournament. This year's tournament fields will be expanded to 12 teams in 2A and 3A and will be determined strictly by power ratings and not a committee as in the past.

On Thursday, Jan. 30, the lower eight seeds will square off at four different sites.

Those winners will join with the four top seeds in a double-elimination tournament on Saturday, Feb. 1, at Freedom.

The winners bracket champ will be considered District 11's No. 1 state qualifier with the winners bracket runner-up and the loser's bracket winner battling for what is being called the "ultimate qualifier." That winner will represent the district in the PIAA team tournament as its No. 2 team.

Also, Hartman said that while the controversial, hot-button issue of student-athlete transfers hasn't completely gone away, District 11 hasn't held any hearings on a transfer case since July 1.

"We've had eligibility hearings on granting someone a fifth year, but we have not had any transfer hearings so far this year," Hartman, who is also the Whitehall High athletic director, said.

District 11 still has to approve all transfers, but generally a hearing is not held unless one of the principals refuses to sign off on the transfer and believes it was for athletic reasons — still a no-no according to PIAA rules.

"We've had probably 25 principal-to-principal sign-offs and we approved those transfers at our last meeting, but we haven't had a non sign-off situation recently," Hartman said. "We had some last year of course, but not a huge number. That doesn't mean it's not an issue for us, however."